Introduction

Advanced applications, based on the use of Language Analysis and Processing techniques, such as machine translation, automatic speech recognition and synthesis, dialogue systems, question answering, information extraction and web search systems are fast becoming an integrated part of our digital devices and daily lives. They are a key component in artificial intelligence-based solutions that provide people with natural ways to communicate with machines (e.g. Siri or Alexa), other people (e.g. machine translation in Skype), information repositories and much more.
These technologies require a mix of skills and approaches from computer science, linguistics, statistics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, logic... If you are a computer specialist, an engineer or a mathematician, you may be wondering about the basic computing tools working behind these devices or how you can integrate these applications within other applications or the web. If you are a philologist or linguist, you probably wonder how linguistic knowledge is used in them: lexicon, grammar and word-senses; morphological, syntactic and semantic analyses...